


your looks, or your acts, or your glory

by toujours_nigel



Series: Conditions Best Suited [1]
Category: The Charioteer - Mary Renault
Genre: Boarding School, Gen, Schoolboys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-09
Updated: 2015-06-09
Packaged: 2018-04-03 16:46:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4107921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Choosing someone to share with in the common room might have been plaguing Hugh more than it ought. Big brothers to careless rescue.</p>
            </blockquote>





	your looks, or your acts, or your glory

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lilliburlero](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/gifts).



> Kid fic because the thought of small serious Treviss and smaller fey Lanyon was oddly enchanting at o'dark thirty.

He had only wanted, Hugh thought with a perfect despair, to not commit some sort of treason against his brothers by picking a desk-mate. He would have been entirely within his rights, since the masters barely interfered, and even Mr. Carruthers, nominally in charge of the form but more addicted to his tobacco pouch than to looking after the souls and well-being of the twenty boys crammed into the first, would have done nothing but nod indifferently. But the College positively overflowed with Minors and Tertiuses and the rare Quartus (even a Quintus or two, but _they_ were Catholic) and Jack and Teddy had been gathering friends and enemies for a decade already, and it just wouldn’t have done. But he’d gone to be told what not to do, only, not this obnoxious and uncalled-for _matchmaking_.

All of which, delivered at a furious hiss, merely had the effect of making Jack look thoroughly startled and not a little offended. “Look,” he said, “come out into the corridor, will you, you’re doing yourself no good carrying on. Out we go.”

The corridor was institutionally cold, a bleak stretch of brick and cement, dismally green. Hugh, bare-foot in his pajamas, felt intimidated and loomed over. Jack, of course, was still in full-rig, come straight up from dinner with Stewart and the Head to do the rounds of the dorms upon curfew. Just last week one of Hugh’s fellows had tried to sneak out of bounds, trusting blindly that the laxity of junior school had accompanied him into the College, and had rung down punishment on himself and strict vigilance about them all. Teddy, exchanging summer’s sweet lap for the rigours of lower fifth and prefecture, had been going about with his face permanently pinched, and Jack looked no better. Rather worse perhaps, for Jack was in extra tutes for everything, and history with the Head, in readiness for going up to Oxford next year. Hugh, who knew all these things, mostly groused and thought it was unfair that Jack looked so utterly forbidding and in no mood for whinging.

“I don’t see your point,” Jack says. “Ungrateful, some might call it. You asked that a problem be solved and it has been.”

“I just wanted not to trip up, not to be sold like… like chattel!”

“Chattel,” Jack said carefully. “There’s a thought. Have you got anything against the boy?”

He did. Lanyon was small and sharp and looked altogether vicious. They had joined together as small boys and proximity had stood in for friendship some years, but Lanyon wasn’t, really, likeable. He came to school after vac acting as though school was better and though it was, of course, nobody at eleven much liked to admit the truth under their show. He read enormously and bested everyone at cricket and seemed entirely closed in, sufficient unto himself. If they were stuck sharing desk and lockers in the common room, Hugh would have to try much harder to make friends, truly friends like fellows were at College and not the laughing communism of junior school that swept grudges and closeness alike away. Perhaps nobody else would want to be, if he was forever towing Lanyon along, and he would have to. That was the absolute worst of it. From a chance-chosen fellow he might have got away, but if Jack and his friends were handing it down from on-high there was little chance of escape.

“No,” he said, and shifted his weight a little from foot to foot. Jack didn’t mean for him to complain that Lanyon was prickly and obnoxious, but other things to do with honour and sportsmanship, where Hugh had nothing to report. “He’s fine. It’s fine. I just…”

“Yes, we rather did the horse-trading for you. Poor Hugh.” He broke off to crack the dormitory door open and glare in balefully.

Someone said, “Sorry Treviss”, and there were the small sounds of scuffling feet and settling covers.

“Look,” Jack said heavily, “no, listen to me. If you decided at half-term you can’t take him anymore, shuffle around then. But Fitz got his brother to look after Alfie their first term in College, so I owe him. Lanyon’s quiet, at least.”

Cousin Alfred was not. Long vac inevitably involved at least one incident of gang violence directed against him, usually led by Emilia. But in school he trotted along at Fitzroy Minor’s heels, yipping like a small, harmless dog. Already in the fortnight they’d been up Hugh had seen him being towed along across the yard to the tuckshop, Fitzroy’s hand clamped over his mouth until, judging from the latter’s elaborately-telegraphed disgust, he had resorted to licking or biting. At home that would have ended in war, massacre, Alfred Jamison shut into the linen closet or chased into a creek or traffic, but Fitzroy Minor had simply wiped his hand—not even on Cousin Alfred’s shirt—and they’d gone off arm in arm.

It wouldn’t be like that with Lanyon, who had the sort of personality that made everyone forget that he was alone, defenceless, and rather small for his age besides. Hugh would be trailing obediently behind him all their days at school, if once he got the upper hand. But all the fellows paired off, and studied together, heads bent two to a desk, and went for games together, and sat next to each other for dinner and in the pews, and in time took studies together. Jack and Fitzroy were a great pair, of course, but there were others less exalted in dignity than Head of School and Games Captain, to whom anyone could aspire: Sharp and Johnson; Moore and Bailey; Cox and Harris.

“I’ll do it,” he said, “but only because it makes you quits with Fitzroy.”

“Terribly grateful,” Jack said, and shook hands.

It wouldn’t be so bad, Hugh thought, pummelling his pillow into submission, reaching down to feel at the tenderness where he’d smashed his toe, getting in. It was only till half-term.


End file.
